“CA-20” is the designation written on the dorsal surface of another cast in the Blue Creek Mountain – Onion Mountain series. It exhibits a surface texture that contains at least 3 major furrows with at least two subtle bands of ridges abutting two of the furrows near the heel. As far as I know, neither Jimmy Chilcutt nor Jeff Meldrum has claimed that this cast’s surface is the result of Bigfoot’s dermal ridges. By now, everyone reading these web pages should be able to spot how obvious these ridges are as desiccation ridges. They exhibit none of the regularity of real primate dermal ridges.

CA-20 is notable also for having even less toe detail than CA-19. In fact, it’s obvious the cast is more or less a foot-shaped blob. I think everyone can agree that whatever made the track in the first place was surely foot shaped and had toes, whether it was made by a Sasquatch or a human hoaxer. It should also be more than obvious that either the track had no detail to begin with, or that the detail was lost by the time the track was cast, or both. Therefore, the surface texture of whatever made the track was either not captured in the substrate, or was long gone by the time the cast was made.

Because of this, it is impossible that the ridge texture we see on the cast today is representative of the surface texture of what made the track in the first place. The furrows and ridge texture we see can only be an artifact of some sort.

What’s even more interesting for the casting artifact hypothesis is to compare the CA-20 surface textures to known desiccation ridge textures on casts that Jeff Meldrum made in 1999. Meldrum cast the footprints of a student of his named Lon Erickson on 10-19-1999. Interestingly, the substrate Meldrum used was natural soil; wind blown loess native to Idaho. As with the soil that I tested taken from the banks of the Duwamish river here in Seattle, we again have confirmation that the desiccation ridge process can occur in natural soils. In the “Erickson” casts arched furrows can clearly be seen that abut several desiccation ridges. The point where the cement slurry first contacted the substrate is also clearly seen.

Note how closely the known desiccation ridges on Meldrum’s cast match the ridge texture seen on the heel of CA-20:

Once you know what you are looking at, the cast simply screams desiccation ridges:

The following photograph is a close-up of the previous photograph, with emphasis on the “toe” area. As can be plainly seen, there is a huge fissure that runs across the toes, abutted by desiccation ridges. Unless you posit Bigfoot having a “web-foot” with no toes, it’s obvious that no single dermal ridge could bridge across five toes.

As if it needed any further argument, compare CA-20 with this test cast, which also exhibits the same kind of deep, meandering furrow on the periphery of the cast:

Of the various cast textures evident on the casts from this trackway, CA-20 is the most obvious in exhibiting desiccation ridges. For me, this is the strongest piece of evidence that this process did in fact occur.